He was not alone.

It was not a feeling that Nishi was used to. Perhaps once, when he had been but a child hoping to fit among his peers, he had felt it, but decades had passed since he was young enough to seek acceptance rather than dominance.

He had been drawn by his newest patron, a murderer-god that had forgotten all else but the process of killing. Nishi wasn’t sure exactly how he’d perceived it, but there had been a trail of oath power leading off to one of those places that existed where nothing was supposed to, and all he had had to do was follow it.

He was getting older, now, but age did not mean senility in a world of gods and their ‘faithful’. No, with age came naught but more experience and more power.

Nishi was no stranger to shifting from his baseline reality into somewhere entirely other by now, so sidling from the real world into here, the murderer-god’s domain.

The god’s body was similar enough to other ones, a mass of crystals and sharp points that extended as far as the eye could see and far beyond, but Nishi knew the murderer-god as unique because it never manifested itself in a human form, even when seeking to punish its followers. Every other god, without exception, had adopted the shape of a human being when communicating to Nishi in the past, be it to form an oath or break one.

Another person was in the domain. He couldn’t see them properly, their figure faint and hazy against the dark backdrop that was the murderer-god’s self, but he could sense them.

He had had a premonition for years that he had not been the only one sworn to this murderer-god, but he had dismissed it for all this time. After all, not even the god had remembered anything about itself, let alone the rest of the world out there. Nishi didn’t even know how he had met the requirements for an oath, but he remembered clear as day the circumstances in which he’d gotten them in. He had been killing the priests at the temple to Igni that had raised him, and then he had been neither here nor there, caught somewhere in between and made an offer by this god.

In the years since, it had sought him in times of rest for any number of reasons, whether it was to indicate its [CURIOSITY] in his actions or express [APPROVAL]— for some reason it appeared to greatly enjoy his slaughter of disciples of Und— but he had never seen another person in here, far and unreachable as they might be.

Far off in the distance, almost further than his eyes could comprehend, Nishi saw a portion of the god light up with activity. The murderer-god was communicating to the other person in that same manner that so many gods enjoyed, then, coalescing a truly massive number of images and ideas into a single burst of information. While it was efficient, it was by no means stealthy, and Nishi had long since learned the ways to pick up on godly speaking that had not been aimed towards him.

The images were hazy, unclear, but he could grasp bits and pieces. A girl, forged through betrayal and subterfuge. A long period of idleness, spent growing up with peasants.

A name, one of a place. Tayan.

Hatred, cold and bright. A single spot of clarity among the haze of the rest of her life. Five disciples, cloaked in robes and armor that he recognized as his own, cut down mercilessly like the weeds they were.

Nishi had not captured the entire essence of the message, but he’d caught enough to confirm his belief that this was a message of [APPROVAL].

As the god finished its message, he could feel a pair of eyes on him, almost imperceptible.

So you saw, he thought. You, too, know that there is another.

He exited the domain of the god as naturally as he’d slid into it, working a seamless weave of oath power to push himself from the unreal to the real.

Nishi emerged into a desolate mountain range, its peaks cleared of life centuries ago. He had been searching in the far, far east for too long now. Once upon a time, he’d intended to carve his way through the civilizations in the west, but then he had met the murderer-god, and he had glimpsed its truth.

This god had not managed to fully leave the plane of reality during the Final Departure, and had hid itself deep in the east, beyond the reach of man and kingdom.

Nishi had gone off that glimpse of the murderer-god and postponed his massacre of nations, but it had been years now and he was only a little closer to finding where the god had hidden itself.

Where the murderer-god slumbered lay power, enormous amounts of it. Nishi had his fair share of that—every oath granted more power and more techniques, and if one lived long enough they would learn how to keep that power from slipping away when that oath was broken—but the amount of energy present in the murderer-god was a truly incredible amount, even for him.

He was a faithless disciple to countless gods, a thief of divinity, and he was the strongest human alive. What was one more oath broken, if it meant all that he wanted and more?

Nishi stretched his limbs and his magic, extending his power out around him. Most disciples had magic granted by one god, and everything they did would be colored by that, but he had long ago solved the riddle of separating magic from element, his power pure and malleable despite the half-presence of dozens of gods that he had stolen power from.

Nishi formed a spell almost without thinking, allowing the elements of the movement-god Caël and the murderer-god to mold the shape of his magic. A colorless blast emerged from his hands, detonating on the peak where he’d been standing, obliterating a hundred-meter span of the peaceful, unchanging stone in an instant, not even dust remaining in its wake. The recoil of it threw him into the air, and he crafted another spell to grant him flight. He fell into thought as he pierced through clouds.

Where is the other disciple? Ah, Tayan, that had been the name. Nishi turned the word over in his head, thinking over it for a bit before connecting it with the name of a kingdom. He’d visited once, before he had begun his path to become the apex of the world.

Before he had begun to seek ascension.

It must have been sixty or so years now, the nation never attracting his interest beyond the mention of its supposedly tough adventurers.

That was no longer the case. Nishi had someone to look for, now.

There was no manual to ascension, no easy path to godhood. Every step he’d taken had been on his own, every little progression a breakthrough. He had made discoveries far beyond the reach of any modern nation, gained understanding of the fundamental patterns that the gods etched into reality. Nishi knew the ways to gather power outside of the eyes of the gods, how to use that power to break a god’s will before it could break him. Through the corpses of thousands, he had reinforced the knowledge of the simple, fundamental truth that so many people wished to avoid— murder was power, in the eyes of the gods.

All this, and he had yet to find out how to truly ascend from his mortal frame.

Until he’d found the murderer-god, and it had whispered to him promises of destruction in a domain close to the murderer-god’s true self, offering him a closer view of its ethereal body than any other god had ever done before. It had offered to let him learn.

And he’d learned, oh he had. After years of regular interaction with his latest patron— far more than he’d had with any previous god— he was sure that he had a path that he could achieve godhood with.

It would, however, require betraying that selfsame patron and slaying it. Deicide, nice as it sounded, was not yet quite within his grasp.

But there was another one out there. Another who might be broken in the same way as him, another who might create the knife with which to kill divinity.

And if she wasn’t broken in the right ways, he would fix that.

To Tayan, Nishi thought. To the other.

He was not alone, and soon the other would learn his truth.